Finally free to talk about “Independence”

At last! A long time in the making and a long time in waiting silently, but now we can finally talk about Project Independence (be sure to watch the cool demo at the bottom of the page). As Brian Madden mentions, this is something that has been brewing for a while. Partnerships like this with Intel don’t just happen overnight, you know!

This is really exciting for us to be working on, and I look forward to extending our solutions for dynamic, real-time desktop assembly all the way to offline mobile use cases. I think what’s also great is that you are getting more insight, earlier, into where Citrix is headed and what the product teams are looking at. The 5 predictionsthat we made today in conjunction with the announcement – while somewhat tongue-in-cheek how they are phrased – have some real powerful ideas and commitments behind them. I mean, of course users will still ask for a better PC – but for different reasons perhaps than they used to. For example, I know that my wife – a college professor, well educated, and generally computer literate – has this knee-jerk reaction to any issue with her PC: wireless flaky? I need a new PC! Email virus? I need a new PC! App update kill another app? I need a new PC! Or my favorite – OS automatic update slowing down performance? I need a new PC! The more we can protect and isolate hardware from OS and OS from apps and apps from personalization, the more we can stop these types of issues from creating the wrong sort of end-user reaction.

We’ve made a pretty big statement so far this year, and it’s not even the end of January yet! As the year goes on, we plan to continue to share more about our roadmap, sometimes specific technologies like the client hypervisor, and sometimes more directional goals, like the 5 predictions.

3 Comments

>>Prediction #1 – Your Company Will No Longer Own Your Laptop
If I got my own money to buy my laptop, then I would buy a 17″ MacBook Pro and would not prefer running it on top of a client-side hypervisor. The concerns mainly are that I would not be happy running a MAC on a client-side hypervisor and suffer through device compatibility problems, app compatibility problems, and 3d graphics performance issues. Instead, I would prefer running MAC OS on bare metal and running my corporate desktop on a type II hypervisor(such as VMWare Fusion) on top of the MAC OS. Also, VMWare’s UNity feature would neatly let me shift seamlessly between my MAC Apps and my corporate Windows Apps.

Also, why would Dell, HP, or some one else sell me a laptop with an OS running on a hypervisor when they know that the OS running on the hypervisor does not give the same user experience as a OS running on bare-metal.

So shouldn’t Citrix be working on a fast type II hypervisor that is free and charge enterprise customers for managing the centralized VM images and delivering them to type II hypervisors?

>>Prediction #2 – Your Company Will Spend More on Coffee and Office Supplies Than it Does on Desktop Management
This predictions depends on the success of a client-side hypervisor and the successful delivery of huge VM Images over the LAN/WAN.

>>Prediction #3 – You Will Access Your Corporate Desktop from Whatever Device is Most Convenient at the Time
Same as #2…

Prediction #4 – You Will Switch Back and Forth Between Work and Personal Desktops on the Same Device, Without Thinking Twice
>> See response to #1…

>>Prediction #5 – You Will Never Complain about pC being too slow..
Well, before I complain about my PC being too slow, I will complain about how the user experience would suck running my personal apps with device compatibility issues, 3d graphics issues, etc.

”I would not be happy running a MAC* on a client-side hypervisor and suffer through device compatibility problems, app compatibility problems, and 3d graphics performance issues….Also, why would Dell, HP, or some one else sell me a laptop with an OS running on a hypervisor when they know that the OS running on the hypervisor does not give the same user experience as a OS running on bare-metal.”

EXACTLY. That’s the whole trick of it and why it’s so important to start this at the lowest level possible to avoid those types of issues. That’s what makes type 1 hypervisors so challenging, right? You gotta get it right for user experience and that’s critical to the whole thing. So hypothetically, if a bare-metal hypervisor had no impact to performance, gave you access to 3D graphics and the GPU, etc., for your personal desktop, would that be okay? *Mac OS, however, is a separate issue – that’s a licensing discussion.

“This predictions depends on the success of a client-side hypervisor and the successful delivery of huge VM Images over the LAN/WAN.”

Not quite, at least not how we are thinking of it. The success depends on the desktop delivery infrastructure, and it’s ability to consolidate management down to as few unique, co-dependent parts (images, apps) as possible. The client side hypervisor lets us more easily extend that system out to the endpoint for local and offline execution, but it is not the only part of reducing costs. And what we are talking about with Project Independence recognizes that continually checking in/out big honking VMs over the LAN/WAN is clunky and unnatural.

And I think I’ve covered off the rest of your responses as well – so to sum up, it’s not ALL about the client hypervisor, although that helps extend use cases, and you are right, a baremetal hypervisor needs to deliver excellent user experience – we agree. Wait until it ships before we try to run benchmarks